California Housing Dataset (1990 Census, Scikit-Learn Processed Version)

California Housing Prices (1990 Census): A spatial dataset of block-level housing metrics from California, first analyzed by Pace & Barry (1997). Processed for machine learning by scikit-learn. License: BSD-3-Clause.

"Processed version for educational purposes. Original data © U.S. Census Bureau."

Pace, R. Kelley, and Ronald Barry. (1997). "Sparse Spatial Autoregressions." Statistics & Probability Letters, 33(3), 291–297. DOI: 10.1016/S0167-7152(96)00140-X.

Provenance Statement

This dataset originates from the 1990 U.S. Census and was first used for statistical modeling in the 1997 paper by Pace and Barry (cited above). It was later repackaged for machine learning purposes, in the scikit-learn library (as sklearn.datasets.fetch_california_housing), where it became a benchmark for data test. 

License Clarification

While the original Census data is public domain, scikit-learn’s curated version is distributed under a BSD license.